The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

A successful performance at a moment of crisis rests largely and essentially upon the depths of

a self wisely and rigorously prepared in the totality of its being—mind and body.

True Christlikeness, true companionship with Christ, comes at the point where it is hard not to respond as he would.

Every Christian must strive to arrive at beliefs about God that faithfully reflect the realities of his or her life and experience, so that each may know how to live effectively before him in his world. That’s theology!

Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God? We’re encouraged somehow today to remove the essence of faith from the particulars of daily human life and relocate it in special times, places, and states of mind.

More and more, we are realizing the enormity of this problem. Upon occasion, we exhort Christians to “take Christ into the workplace” or “bring Christ into the home.” But doesn’t this only point to the deadly assumption that Christians normally leave Christ at the church?

One specific errant concept has done inestimable harm to the church and God’s purposes with us—and that is the concept that has restricted the Christian idea of salvation to mere forgiveness of sins. Yet it is so much more. Salvation as conceived today is far removed from what it was in the beginnings of Christianity and only by correcting it can God’s grace in salvation be returned to the concrete, embodied existence of our human personalities walking with Jesus in his easy yoke.

The message of Jesus himself and of the early disciples was not just one of the forgiveness of sins, but rather was one of newness of life—which of course involved forgiveness as well as his death for our sins.